With the recent demise of Napster I asked an associate what he thought people were now going to do to take care of their MP3 needs. He gave me a look as if I had just arrived from the planet Mars, the bill for lunch and finally the web address for Audiogalaxy and inquired "Where have you been?"

Where have I been, indeed. Not only does Audiogalaxy offer access to all the MP3's on the hard drives of all those who care to participate (thus duplicating Napster in this regard), but does so with an amazingly clean and effective interface. The search, queueing and downloading ability of Audiogalaxy is simply light years ahead of what Napster had to offer. No big, heavy front end to download and install, just a very small slick little program, which they call the Audiogalaxy Satellite. The most confusing thing about using Audiogalaxy is its simplicity.

Is this ability to reach out and share copyrighted music sitting on your neighbors computers legal? There is just no way I'm going to breach this subject on this day. Lets just say that Audiogalaxy does everything Napster did and does it much better.

In addition to sharing MP3 files off of your neighbors hard drive, Audiogalaxy takes things further:

"Audiogalaxy offers 25 MB of free web space to musicians for MP3 files, band images and a web page. All content (music, images and html) is acceptable as long as it is related to your band (exceptions are pirated material and software). Every MP3 you upload to our site will be available for users to download, rate and discuss. We also have daily spotlight features of bands on Audiogalaxy that run on the front page as well as within each genre section. With over 80,000 hits per day, you can be assured that your band will receive some newfound exposure."

It appears the bottom line is this: Original material offered up by bands, such as those mentioned above, sits on Audiogalaxy server and is accessed directly from the server via the Satellite Search Engine. When it comes to hooking up to other peoples hard drives and looking for specific song titles you again use the Satellite Search Engine. Here is what they have to say about that:

"The Audiogalaxy Search Engine is used to search a database of FTP sites for files in the MP3 format as well as our own Audiogalaxy music database. Audiogalaxy is not responsible for the specific contents of each site, and Audiogalaxy is not responsible for what you do with the files themselves."

Is the preceding statement from Audiogalaxy enough to keep them out of the same pot of boiling oil Napster fell into? Only time will tell...